#I am not stupid | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

elodieunderglass · 7 months ago

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Ok so going out to a bigger context and a massive bugbear of mine: this is tumblr, so you’ve probably seen a lot of posts from ✨humanities✨ people that go like this.

Dumb uneducated masses: hurr durr historians lied to us! I never learned about this in school! Historians say dumb things like “we don’t know if gay people ever existed” but I saw a TikTok about gay people in history. A conspiracy I think from the Man

Buff victimised wojack historians: we are not hiding things from you! We are doing important work on these topics in our theses! A tiny amount of intensive educated research would bring you the knowledge you crave! I’m a gay history PhD with gay history book ACTUALLY. You are all illiterate, and blaming us only shows your lack of education.

Another historian: god it’s so frustrating how stupid the public is when our academic publications are RIGHT THERE.

Another historian: smh it’s the way they’d prefer to get misinformation on tumblr and TikTok.

Historians in particular do this a lot. I could link you to a few distinct posts that do exactly this with 40k+ notes. and lots of sanctimonious people complaining about how the public have NO information literacy, and ALL of these complaints are PERFECTLY addressed in Ratbin and Huguenot (2001) “Gender and Ungender in Mesopotamia” which these morons would KNOW if they only (paywall)(paywall)(paywall). You have seen multiple popular posts on tumblr where extremely intelligent, kind, smart, educated people are not realising that in their complaints about their discipline’s massive communications issue, they are repeatedly demonstrating why they have a comms issue. You have possibly even reblogged it, without realising the massive flaw at the heart of the rhetoric. We usually trust historians to have good rhetoric! If they don’t, who does?

But surely this is common across academic disciplines? Well, we note that sciences have an entire professional field called “science communication.” When someone asks a science question on social media, scientists usually sprint to be the first to give the clearest answer.Scientists consider it a personal failing if the public don’t understand a key update in modern science, and will often go out of their way on social media to spread correct content in accessible ways. Science grants and funding bodies and journals require that scientists have plans to communicate, and make accessible and publicly serviceable, pretty much every piece of funded research and increasing amounts of published research. Scientists go into schools and talk to little kids and have festivals -for free- they don’t get paid for this and yet you can call up any ambassador association and ask for a lecture and get one. Science communicators pound the pavement, working as park rangers and forest school leaders, comedians and podcasters; an ENTIRE LINE OF WORK involves getting paid by researchers to translate, communicate and promote their science. There are companies and people for whom this is their paid, actual factual salaried career.

And I cannot stress enough how easy it is to get any given science PhD student to come and do any form of science communication for free. They will do it for free , and they will thank you for the opportunity.

The attitude in the sciences is “if the public don’t understand, then we’ve failed to communicate, and need to do better.” There is an entire professional field dedicated to doing this; as OP says, science museums do not scorn to stoop to the level of children.

Now I return to the image of the science PhD student, who is quivering with anticipation at being asked to talk about sea turtle conservation to small children, who will objectively never give them funding, in the true belief that it is good for society and sea turtles to do such things. We can intuit, from pop culture, the scientist personality: the belief that you can save the world. if you just get the work done and the words right and people believe you, you can save the world. We instantly see the fears and hopes of scientists from this; we can study the psychology and history of the Mad Scientist trope, exploring what happens when the motivations of this personality become no longer socially acceptable. We can see this belief that science, like a key, could open the lock that saves the world; this explains the franticness of the personality that gladly spends its free time forging different keys. The hope here is the beautiful perfect Argument, a shining radiant Key, that one presents to The Public, and suddenly they cry out and fall down and say “Of COURSE! we care about ocean acidification so much now! We will immediately overthrow everyone who doesn’t care, and fix it at once.” To this personality, knowledge sharing is survival. The more people who are educated enough to appreciate and admire and pay the scientist, the better the scientist has of realising their hopes (saving the world) and avoiding their fear (getting it wrong and failing forever.)

Now we turn to the graduate student in fine arts, and contrary to what we would think of progressive bohemian artists, we often see a different set of fears and hopes that are conservative. Conservative, fundamentally and etymologically, means to hold; to grasp; to keep; to spend small amounts very cautiously. perhaps they are seeking to curate and preserve previous works, like OP’s curators: or perhaps hoping to create valuable works of their own, to sell for a living to a special population of discerning rich people. Either way, if Just Anyone could create a work that appeals to rich collectors; if Just Anyone could declare what is art; if Just Any Object could be found to have value; if Just Anyone could look at curated objects and understand them with context and appreciation: it rather undermines the idea that collecting this education is inherently valuable. And thus we see the response: the public should educate themselves. An arts education is good to have, and probably makes more customers, but people should go and get one, rather than being given it for free; we know that most people won’t, but that’s okay, because it’s important that the Knowledge itself is curated. The best people to understand and interpret these works have won the right to do so through proper curation of the Knowledge. In a sense knowledge should be hoarded or handed out sparingly because that is how it simultaneously retains value, and ensures the good quality of the most knowledgeable people.

Similarly, history does not attract the “save the world” nerds in the same way that science does. And that’s honestly fine. It’s a burnout personality - kind of a psychological complex - too dependent on externals. The Locked Tomb does not feature the apocalypse of a mad historian.

But you can’t desire the fruits of the hard work that the science community reaps (public appreciation, attention, funding, pop culture) without doing some reflection about why you want all fruit and no work. And no, it isn’t that Nobody Cares (And Should Get An Education So That They Care More, Which They Won’t, Because Nobody Cares About Humanities Anymore, Because The Sciences Are Luring Them Away with their Wiles.) nobody cared about pretty much any part of science until someone found the key to the comms. Plastic straws in sea turtle noses, save the bees, plant more trees, feathered dinosaurs, genes that cure cancer - all images, all stories that made people care. If the sciences are better storytellers, then don’t sulk; tell a better story! Maybe more people would care about the humanities if you secured their passions as children! Maybe the fact that nobody is reading your book is giving clues about accessibility. Maybe the public don’t really read that many paywalled papers, and you should be doing podcasts and press releases and tumblr essays about them. Maybe the fact that people prefer TikTok means that YOU SHOULD MAKE A BETTER TIKTOK.

Science communication says: you don’t understand the results of my science education? No problem! Let me show you! Don’t worry - even a kid can learn it. We’ll make it fun! Where did we lose you?

While the humanities are spending far too much time saying: you don’t understand the results of my arts education? Well you should get an arts degree, and then you would. If you weren’t so stupid and easily misled by TikTok, you would have simply gone to a university library and placed a hold on my book - what do you mean you’re twelve.

If you read all this and it makes you feel defensive: good! The storytelling arts shouldn’t rest on their laurels. It should be a challenge, a provocation, the red gleam of the other racehorse’s eye as it pulls away from you. You should be champing at the bit to prove me wrong - to tell a better story at ONCE - to change the world.

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

#obviously obviously obviously NOT ALL HUMANITIES #etc etc #I am not stupid #it is just that one cannot blame the public for not understanding while simultaneously desiring a public that understands.#and those posts just don’t have any self awareness about it.#of course there are good art museums etc #but what are our intentions and what is the material impact of our intentions? the end.

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